By I was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles to an immigrant mother from El Salvador. After completing the ninth grade, she decided to leave behind her life to begin a new one in the United States.
Being a first-generation college student is hard, especially coming from a school district that has a school-to-prison pipeline. My classes were overcrowded with rowdy students who didn’t care about school. They had little respect for teachers, and instead of paying attention in class, they would play spin-the-bottle and truth-or-dare. At times, while the teachers tried to give a lecture, they would blow-up condoms and pass them around like balloons.
At one point, students were throwing out the computers from the second story of a building and even knocked down one of the doors of a classroom. The school had to call the police to put everything in order. Everyday they were stationed right out in front of the campus to make sure nobody left without permission.
The school-to prison pipeline is a national trend where children in urban communities are expected to be criminals as adults, hence more funds are used to build prisons rather than to build more schools.
Just recently the Los Angeles Unified School District board voted down a plan to defund school police. According to Census Reporter, in South Central, 54% of students graduate high school and only 6.1 percent obtain a bachelor’s degree or higher.
In high school I was not the worst student, but I was not the best. I was somewhere in between and still managed to graduate as an honor student. I was given a purple yarn honor’s cord to wear at graduation along with my gray cap and gown, the color of my graduating class.
At just 17-years-old, I graduated in summer 2011 and had no idea what was waiting for me outside of Manual Arts High School. I went straight into college blind-folded, stumbling around without any idea of what I was getting into.
I chose to go to Santa Monica College, and flunked my first semester. Because of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, I was so used to failing classes and retaking them the following semester without any worry in the world. This act prevented students in grades K-12 from being retained in school. Regardless of the grades students earned, they were still promoted to the next grade level along with the rest of their peers.
I thought college would be the same, so instead of studying for tests I would just guess the best sounding answer, I only partially did my homework assignments and I didn’t put a lot of thought into my class assignments. To top it off, I hadn’t even declared a major so the classes felt boring. As a result, I was placed on academic probation. My following semester I was only allowed to take six units, a total of two classes.
Since I would go to campus only twice a week, I would have way too much time on my hands. Sometimes I would miss class because I just didn’t want to deal with the two-and-a-half hour commute to campus. I felt like I wasn’t doing anything with my life and I ended up just taking a fail for my classes.
I was disqualified from taking classes at SMC.
I chose to start working at a Little Caesars just two blocks from my house and a year later I got promoted to an assistant manager. This helped build character, as I became more responsible and I learned how to manage my time. I decided I was ready to go back to college.
I was reinstated in the spring 2013 semester, and crazy things happened this time. One time, I was in the library studying with a friend and suddenly everyone’s phone was going off with notifications. The college had sent an emergency evacuation notice to all students and staff members, because there was a bomb threat. Then, close to finals, there was a shooting that started off campus and ended up on the campus grounds. Five people died that day.
To think that I could have been there when it happened scared me. That was it for me, I decided to stop going to college and focused on making extra money.
I got a second job as a cashier at a Sizzler in Korea Town and juggled the two jobs for a year. It became a vicious never-ending cycle for me, until I decided to quit one of the two jobs.
The managers at Little Caesars were putting a lot of pressure on me with my workload, I had a full-time responsibility for a part-time minimum wage pay. They would constantly call me on my time off to question me about the sales and labor hours used during my shift.
In the summer of 2015, I quit working at Little Caesars
Fall 2015 came around and I was reinstated to SMC with academic probation. This time, I chose to take a counseling course to help me choose a major. I already knew that I was a decent writer, and wouldn’t mind turning that into a career.
Finally, I declared a major: journalism. From that point on, everything fell into place for me. My classes were finally interesting to me and I was actually having fun with them. I could see my future before me and I knew that I made the right decision. It took me about another four years until I finally graduated in 2019 with my associate degree for transfer in journalism. With this degree I got accepted into one of the most competitive universities in the California State University system.
I am really proud of myself for how far I’ve come, because not many of my classmates from high school went to college. Those few who did go to college went one of two ways, graduated on time or dropped out during their first semester.
Exactly 10 years after I began my college career, I will be graduating next fall semester from Long Beach State with my Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism.With the skills I have acquired from SMC and am perfecting at CSULB, I plan to become a community journalist based in Los Angeles.
My goal is to create multimedia content based on the struggles and successes of the people in Los Angeles. With the experiences I’ve had as a first-generation college student, I believe that my insight can aid in finding these stories. I have been witness to these untold stories for so long, and I want to be the one to share them in order to create awareness within my community.
